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EJToday: Top Headlines

EJToday is SEJ's selection of new and outstanding stories on environmental topics in print and on the air, updated every weekday. SEJ also offers a free e-mailed digest of the day's EJToday postings, called SEJ-beat. SEJ members are subscribed automatically. Non-members may subscribe here. EJToday is also available via RSS feed.

"President Donald Trump’s 2019 budget proposal will again call for ending the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, an independent agency that investigates major industrial accidents, according to a senior government official familiar with the plan."

"A coalition of several states and one Canadian province have introduced an initiative designed to block the Asian carp from entering the Great Lakes. Funding from this partnership would bolster the defenses in Chicago waterways, which border the lakes."

"The Interior Department is exploring making wholesale changes to a massive California desert renewable energy zone that could lead to opening environmentally sensitive areas designated for conservation to possible commercial-scale wind, solar and geothermal power projects."

"Polar bears are struggling to find enough seals to eat, and the problem will get worse as the planet warms because their metabolisms are much faster than previously thought, researchers said Thursday."

"The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention resigned on Wednesday, in the middle of the nation’s worst flu epidemic in nearly a decade, because of her troubling financial investments in tobacco and health care companies that posed potential conflicts of interest."

"The Trump administration is poised to ask Congress for deep budget cuts to the Energy Department’s renewable energy and energy efficiency programs, slashing them by 72 percent overall in fiscal 2019, according to draft budget documents obtained by The Washington Post."

"As the head of the federal agency controlling billions of acres of public lands and waters, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has spent the past year making bold policy proclamations to advance President Trump’s energy agenda .... But legal experts say many of the moves were made without fully considering the laws and procedures governing changes like these, making them vulnerable to legal challenges that could delay or block them."

"The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency said on Wednesday it would continue providing water, meals and other essentials to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico despite earlier reports its humanitarian mission in the U.S. territory would end on Wednesday."

"U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw federal protections from millions of acres of Utah wilderness will reopen much of the iconic terrain to gold, silver, copper, and uranium land claims under a Wild West-era mining law, according to federal officials."

"Nine environmental groups sued the U.S. government Wednesday to block a land trade that could lead to construction of a road through a national wildlife refuge in Alaska that is habitat for migrating waterfowl."

"Seven years after Dynegy Inc. scrapped one of the last coal plants in downstate Illinois, environmental groups are accusing the company of failing to prevent toxic waste stored nearby from seeping into the state’s only National Scenic River."